Painting: A Certain Alienated Majesty

Talk was never Edward Hopper's strong suit.
His wife Jo, the chatterbox in the family, once observed: "Conversation
with Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it
doesn't thump when it hits bottom." Hopper's eloquence was visual. When
he died last week at the age of 84, in the Washington Square studio
where he had lived for the past 54 years, he left a half-century-long
portrait of the workaday face of America. He had captured it with all
the homely honesty of a foursquare realistbut in the lambent...